Introducing the eWaterCycle Python package for open and FAIR hydrological modelling

<div>The eWaterCycle platform (https://www.ewatercycle.org/) is a fully Open Source system designed explicitly to advance the state of Open and FAIR Hydrological modelling. It allows scientists to set up experiments in a standardized way and run them interactively in a Jupyter environment.</div><div>&#160;</div><div>Previously we have presented various components that constitute the system: a preprocessing pipeline using ESMValTool (https://www.esmvaltool.org/) to generate meteorological forcing data, containerized models implementing the Basic Model Interface (https://bmi.readthedocs.io/), gRPC4BMI (https://github.com/eWaterCycle/grpc4bmi) to communicate with these containers from a Python environment, a visual explorer that lets the user set up an experiment with a few clicks and automatically generates a notebook based on the selected settings, and utilities to work with observations and analyse results.</div><div>&#160;</div><div>Recently we have officially released the eWaterCycle Python package (https://ewatercycle.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) that connects these components to provide a simple and clean user interface. The core of the package is modelled after PyMT (https://pymt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html), extended with convenience functions to make the interface more user friendly, e.g. using xarray (http://xarray.pydata.org/en/stable/index.html) for spatial data and providing more user-friendly time accessors. Separate modules are available to load forcing data and parameter sets from the system and configure them correctly for the target model.</div><div>&#160;</div><div>The package comes with comprehensive documentation, including a suite of example notebooks. It also includes setup instructions for system administrators and guidance for incorporating new models. Currently, the following models are available through the eWaterCycle system: wflow, lisflood, marrmot m01, marrmot m14 and pcrglobwb.</div><div>&#160;</div><div>The release of the package marks a milestone in the development towards our goal of fully reproducible, open, and FAIR Hydrological modelling.</div>